15 Skills You Need to
Become an
Awesome
Digital Marketer
15 SKILLS YOU NEED TO BECOME AN AWESOME DIGITAL MARKETER
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Introduction
Despite how young it is compared to other professional fields, digital marketing has emerged as a popular
area for starting and developing a career. There are hundreds of thousands of digital marketers in the US
alone, all working towards the same common goal: to help their companies grow through channels like
email, paid search, paid social, SEO, and more.
(Don’t worry. You’ll be familiar with all those terms by the time you’re done reading.)
When you think about it, it’s unsurprising that digital marketing has grown rapidly as a career path over
the past 20 years or so. Worldwide, we collectively use Google over 3 billion times a day. Elsewhere, the
average internet user spends nearly two and a half hours each day interacting with social media platforms
like Facebook and Instagram. On top of that, we check our email inboxes about 15 times throughout the
average day.
The percentage of people using the internet over time. Via Smart Insights.
As consumers spend more and more time with digital media, companies invest more and more money in
their efforts to convert that attention into revenue. A lot of that money, of course, goes towards people—
hiring bright, creative marketers who can find new ways to reach consumers and turn them into customers.
Although there’s no shortage of digital marketing jobs out there, there’s also no shortage of people
competing to get them. So, here are the 15 skills you can develop this year to make you a better, more wellrounded digital marketer.
15 SKILLS YOU NEED TO BECOME AN AWESOME DIGITAL MARKETER
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1. Content marketing
For businesses with long sales cycles, content marketing—creating content in order to drive website
traffic, build a brand, and generate leads—is a valuable channel.
Although it’s pretty much ubiquitous at this point, content marketing is particularly prevalent among B2B
companies. Faced with fierce competition and budget-constrained prospects, B2B companies need
ways to both differentiate themselves and win trust. When created thoughtfully, content—in the form of
blog posts, whitepapers, ebooks, infographics, videos, and podcasts—is the stone that kills both birds.
Good news: there’s no shortage of specific skills beneath the content marketing umbrella for you to
focus on. Writers, speakers, designers, and videographers are always in demand.
To learn more about content marketing, check out these resources:
•
How to Elevate Your Brand & Content with a House Style Guide
•
5 Creative Ways to Find Things to Write About
•
The 7-Step Guide to Creating Amazing Cornerstone Content
15 SKILLS YOU NEED TO BECOME AN AWESOME DIGITAL MARKETER
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2. CMS experience
No matter how good you are at writing or designing, you can’t succeed as a content marketer without
familiarizing yourself with a content management system, more commonly known as a CMS. A CMS is
simply an interface built into a website that enables you to create and edit digital content, such as a blog
post. WordPress and Drupal are two common examples.
Although developing the skills that enable you to create high-quality content should be your main focus,
adding CMS experience to your resume is a must nonetheless. We recommend poking around a few of
the major interfaces so you’re comfortable enough to hit the ground running when the time comes to
start creating content.
This is Drupal.
To learn more about content management systems, check out these resources:
•
How to Make a WordPress Website: A Step-by-Step Guide
•
The Beginner’s Guide to Drupal 8
•
11 Rules for Selecting the Right CMS
15 SKILLS YOU NEED TO BECOME AN AWESOME DIGITAL MARKETER
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3. CRM software experience
Not to be confused with CMS, CRM stands for customer relationship management. Likewise, a CRM
software, such as Salesforce or Oracle, is simply a tool that tracks and organizes the interactions
between a business and its prospects and customers.
This is Salesforce.
That’s a bit vague—let’s use an example. Imagine that you’ve honed your content marketing skills (writing
in particular) and become proficient with WordPress. Your blog posts are performing well, and in order
to convert some of that traffic into leads, you’ve collaborated with your coworkers to put together an
awesome ebook. Without a CRM software, however, there’s no way to keep track of who downloads the
ebook or how you and your peers can get in touch with them.
Without a CRM software, a business can’t fill its funnel—which makes adding experience with at least one
of them to your resume such a good idea.
To learn more about customer relationship management software, check out
these resources:
•
A Beginner’s Guide to CRM
•
8 Ways to Find the Right CRM System for Your Business
•
A Beginner’s Guide to Salesforce
15 SKILLS YOU NEED TO BECOME AN AWESOME DIGITAL MARKETER
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4. Mobile marketing
Every year, more and more web traffic comes from smartphones. Although you’ll often hear that people
only use their phones when they’re “on the go,” reality presents a far more complex picture. Sure—the
smartphone is the device of choice when someone’s walking down the street or taking the train home
from work. But let’s be honest with ourselves: people use their smartphones at home all the time.
Nobody grabs their laptop to check Facebook when they first wake up in the morning.
The point we’re trying to make is that optimizing
marketing materials for mobile devices has become
table stakes. Whether business owners want to admit
it to themselves or not, their prospects are interacting
with their businesses on their smartphones. If they’re
not delivering an acceptable user experience at
those key touchpoints, they’re throwing money out
the window. Homepages, landing pages, content—
everything needs to be mobile-friendly.
Because businesses are increasingly aware of the
importance of mobile optimization, making the time to
educate yourself is an investment you won’t regret.
To learn more about mobile marketing,
check out these resources:
•
5 Ways to Increase Your Mobile
Conversion Rate
•
7 Smarter Ways to Approach Mobile
Search Ads
•
Google Ads Mobile Benchmarks for
YOUR Industry
If business owners are not delivering an acceptable user
experience at those key touchpoints, they’re throwing
money out the window.
15 SKILLS YOU NEED TO BECOME AN AWESOME DIGITAL MARKETER
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5. Lead nurturing
Let’s return to the hypothetical scenario we talked about in the CRM section. You’ve got steady blog
traffic and a killer ebook that’s bringing a ton of new leads into the company’s CRM software. That’s
awesome!
But … what comes next? Those ebook leads don’t mean anything unless a substantial percentage of
them convert into customers down the line. In other words, now that you’ve established a reliable lead
magnet that’s bringing prospects to the top of the funnel, you and your coworkers have to figure out how
you’re going to get them to the bottom of the funnel.
That’s what lead nurturing is all about—coming up with additional offers to send to prospects until they
eventually decide to try (or buy!) the product or service you’re marketing. Like your top-of-funnel ebook,
a lot of these offers should be free educational resources. Then, once a particular prospect has accepted
enough offers for you to feel confident that they’re interested in your product or service, you can serve
them an offer for a free trial or a demo. Ideally, they’ll be so impressed that they can’t help but become a
customer!
Lead nurturing is a fundamental to B2B marketing in particular. Add it to your resume and you should
have no trouble finding work in that space.
To learn more about lead nurturing, check out these resources:
•
11 Ways to Turn Prospects into Customers
•
4 Emails to Include in Every PPC Lead Nurturing Campaign
•
3 Steps to a High-Converting Lead Capture Strategy
15 SKILLS YOU NEED TO BECOME AN AWESOME DIGITAL MARKETER
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6. Email marketing
In order to make the thoughtful, compelling offers that nurture leads into customers, you and your
coworkers will need a way to stay in contact with prospects. Email marketing—a digital channel that’s
stood the test of time in a constantly changing industry—is the best way to do so.
From our State of the Online Advertising Landscape report.
Let’s address the elephant in the room: a lot of people seem to think that email marketing is dead. The
numbers, however, tell a different story. The majority of B2B marketers say email is their most effective
channel for generating revenue. 80% of retail professionals name email as their top customer retention
strategy. Every $1 of email marketing spend yields $44 in returns. Need we go on?
The point is that companies in nearly every vertical need some form of an email marketing strategy.
Whether you’re trying to generate and nurture leads or drive ecommerce sales, having a degree of email
marketing knowledge in your back pocket is advantageous.
To learn more about email marketing, check out these resources:
•
35 Face-Melting Email Marketing Stats
•
How to Use Email Remarketing to Achieve Inbox Domination
•
5 Steps to Grow Your Small Business with Cold Email
15 SKILLS YOU NEED TO BECOME AN AWESOME DIGITAL MARKETER
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7. Video production
Whether it’s executed through organic content on Facebook or paid ads on YouTube, video marketing
has established itself as a highly effective way to engage prospects. Although there are numerous
variables at work here, we’re confident that a key explanation for the effectiveness of video marketing is
that it enables prospects to easily envision how a company will make their lives better.
Nobody buys a product or service unless they’re confident that it’s going to improve their life in some
way. Likewise, proving to a potential customer that whatever you’re marketing will satisfy their desire or
erase their pain point is one of the biggest challenges you face as a marketer. Video is one of the best
ways to overcome this challenge and win new business.
Think about which option sounds more
persuasive: a still image of a pair of
sneakers or an inspirational video of a
runner using those sneakers to achieve
their fitness goals?
Exactly. Because video is so effective
and the demand for it only continues to
increase, it follows that you can gain from
developing some basic skills. Whether it’s
scripting, shooting, or editing, you won’t
regret making yourself useful in the video
production space.
To learn more about video
marketing, check out these
resources:
•
The Complete Guide to
Facebook Video Ads
•
13 Tips for Creating More
Effective Instagram Video Ads
•
Top 10: Best Video Editing
Software for Beginners
Video marketing enables prospects to easily envision how
a company will make their lives better.
15 SKILLS YOU NEED TO BECOME AN AWESOME DIGITAL MARKETER
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8. Paid search advertising
Take off your marketing hat, if you will, and think like a consumer for a moment. If you encounter a
problem that can be solved with a product or service—a broken dishwasher, for example—where do you
go to find that solution? If you’re like most people, you’ll turn to a search engine like Google.
OK, you can put your marketing hat back on. Whether a company sells discounted women’s apparel or
an enterprise software solution, the consumers they’re trying to reach use Google to find solutions to
their problems. That’s exactly why paid search advertising—the practice of buying sponsored positions
on the search engine results page—has become so common for both B2C and B2B companies in recent
years. Between Google and Bing, millions of advertisers are making their best offers to high-intent
search engine users.
Despite the ubiquity—the necessity—of paid search, most people have never heard of it. In other words,
if you’re willing to hit the books, there are plenty of opportunities out there.
To learn more about paid search advertising, check out these resources:
•
Paid Search Marketing: Optimize Paid Search Campaigns with Better Tools
•
How to Use Google Ads Effectively
•
The Big, Easy Guide to Keyword Research for Businesses
15 SKILLS YOU NEED TO BECOME AN AWESOME DIGITAL MARKETER
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9. Search engine optimization (SEO)
At a fundamental level, the case for search engine optimization—also known as SEO and organic search
marketing—is the same as the case for paid search: it enables businesses to engage the consumers who
are actively looking for the products or services they provide. However, each discipline comes with a
unique set of steps to success.
Whereas succeeding in paid search involves beating competitors through an auction-style bidding
process, succeeding in organic search involves thoughtfully structuring a website and creating relevant,
high-quality content that gives site visitors a good experience and earns links from other publishers. In a
nutshell, SEO is all about proving to Google and Bing that a website deserves to be on the first page of
the search engine results.
Any business with a website needs an SEO strategy. After all, if consumers can’t find it though Google
or Bing, what’s the point of having a website in the first place? Having a website and lacking an SEO
strategy is like buying a car and letting the seller keep the key. Accordingly, marketers with SEO
experience are always valuable.
To learn more about search engine optimization, check out these resources:
•
SEO Basics: A Complete Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization
•
The Only Off-Page SEO Walkthrough You’ll Ever Need
•
The 10-Step SEO Audit: How to Find Your SEO Mistakes and Opportunities
15 SKILLS YOU NEED TO BECOME AN AWESOME DIGITAL MARKETER
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10. Paid social media advertising
Generally speaking, social media advertising is effective for two reasons: (1) because consumers spend
a ton of time on social media platforms and (2) because those platforms enable advertisers to reach the
consumers most likely to become their customers. With the ability to turn anonymized user data into
thoughtful, specific audiences, a business can get the perfect offers (perhaps some killer downloadable
content!) in front of target consumers as they’re engaging with their favorite content.
The dual appeal of paid social—captive audiences
and first-party data—has made it table stakes for
businesses investing in digital marketing. There
are over eight million advertisers on Facebook and
Instagram alone. That doesn’t simply mean social
media marketers are in high demand; it means great
social media marketers are in high demand. As users’
feeds become increasingly saturated and platforms
find new ad products to monetize, businesses will
need smart marketers who are willing to take on new
challenges in an ever-changing space.
To learn more about paid social media
advertising, check out these resources:
•
How to Advertise on Facebook in 10 Steps
•
Every Facebook Ad Targeting Option in One
Epic Graphic (Updated!)
•
The Complete Guide to Advertising on
Instagram
There are over eight million advertisers on Facebook
and Instagram alone.
15 SKILLS YOU NEED TO BECOME AN AWESOME DIGITAL MARKETER
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11. User experience (UX) design
User experience, more commonly known as UX, means exactly what you’d expect it to mean: it refers
to the way prospects and customers experience a website. It goes without saying that businesses want
to create the best UX possible for their site visitors. We could create a series of guides dedicated solely
to discussing UX best practices, but we’ll leave you with this for the time being: navigating a website
should be simple, intuitive, and painless. The more difficult a company makes it for their site visitors to
find the information they need, the fewer they can expect to convert into paying customers.
Not great.
At this point in the 21st century, very few businesses can get away with lacking a website. Nevertheless,
the number of poorly designed business websites is legitimately staggering. Although some of those
business owners may be blissfully unaware, we’re willing to bet that many of them simply lack the time to
improve their UX—thus creating the need for them to outsource to a freelancer or hire a new employee.
To learn more about UX design, check out these resources:
•
6 Powerful Ways UX Can Affect Your Conversion Rates
•
5 Critical Landing Page Design Mistakes that Cost You Conversions
•
How to Use F & Z Patterns in Your Landing Page Design
15 SKILLS YOU NEED TO BECOME AN AWESOME DIGITAL MARKETER
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12. Data analysis
Navigating a CRM software, nurturing new leads down the funnel, segmenting email marketing
audiences, targeting past customers with killer Facebook ad creative—none of these things are possible
if you’re not comfortable working with data.
Data is both a good and a bad thing to the owner or CMO of a company that uses digital marketing
channels to reach prospective customers. Data is good in the sense that it enables the company to
allocate their budget as efficiently as possible. Data is bad in the sense that it’s seemingly endless
and endowed with the terrifying power to cripple an entire marketing engine when used or
interpreted improperly.
That’s why data analysts are so badly needed by digital marketing
teams today—to patiently comb through mountains of numbers and
emerge with meaningful insights the rest of the team can use to inform
their strategies going forward. Frankly, it’s one of the more difficult jobs
discussed in this guide. But it’s also one of the most crucial.
To learn more about data analysis, check out these
resources:
•
Marketing Analytics: Success Through Analysis
•
How to Find Bigger AND Better Audiences to Reach Using
Google Analytics
•
3 Strategies Anyone Can Use to Attribute Success Beyond
the Last Click
Google Analytics is a one-stop
shop for website data.
Data analysts patiently comb through mountains of numbers
and emerge with meaningful insights the rest of the team can
use to inform their strategies going forward.
15 SKILLS YOU NEED TO BECOME AN AWESOME DIGITAL MARKETER
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13. Data visualization
Let’s go all the way back to the first skill listed in this guide: content marketing. You’ll recall that—in
addition to bringing new leads to the top of the marketing funnel—driving website traffic and building a
brand are two of the key objectives behind content creation.
Over the years, we’ve found that sharing original data that others will find useful and insightful is an
incredibly effective way to achieve those two objectives with a single piece of content. If the data analyst
you work with stumbles upon something—say, a correlation between the specificity of a Facebook
audience and CPA—sharing it with the world is a fantastic way to both get people on the company
website and brand it as a cutting edge resource.
From our State of the Digital Marketing Agency report.
The big, inevitable hurdle: presenting original data intuitively. Because data that nobody can understand
is practically useless, the ability to turn it into simple, aesthetically pleasing visualizations is a highly
valuable skill. If you’re drawn to the idea of honing your data analysis chops, why not parlay them with a
knack for turning numbers into figures? Talk about killing two birds with a single stone.
To learn more about data visualization, check out these resources:
•
Data Visualization Beginner’s Guide: A Definition, Examples, and Learning Resources
•
Data Visualization: What It Is and Why It Matters
•
10 Useful Ways to Visualize Your Data (With Examples)
15 SKILLS YOU NEED TO BECOME AN AWESOME DIGITAL MARKETER
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14. HTML, CSS, & JavaScript
(coding languages)
Like we said earlier: very few businesses can get away with lacking a website. More specifically, no
business that’s using digital marketing to drive leads and sales can get away with lacking landing pages.
Building a website and some landing pages, of course, requires knowledge of three major coding
languages: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
HTML, which stands for Hypertext Markup Language, is a type of code that defines the content and
structure of a web page. In other words, HTML determines what a company’s website says and the way
that content is presented.
CSS, which stands for Cascading Style Sheets, is a type of code that defines how web pages look—the
aesthetic appearance of a website. At a high level, CSS determines basic attributes like font size, text
color, and margin width.
JavaScript, finally, is a programming language that enables interactive functionality on a website. So, for
example, if you’re building a landing page for a Facebook Ads campaign and you want to gate a content
offer behind a lead gen form, JavaScript is necessary.
Although there’s no shortage of tech companies that offer web development and landing page solutions,
the ability to manually build and update a website will never lose its value in the marketing world. Like
picking up data analysis, learning to code ain’t easy. But it’s certainly rewarding.
To learn more about coding languages, check out these resources:
•
Codeacademy
•
Code.org
•
Learntocodewith.me
15 SKILLS YOU NEED TO BECOME AN AWESOME DIGITAL MARKETER
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15. Digital marketing tools
Quite literally, there are thousands of tools designed specifically for digital marketers. No matter what
role you play, if you’re in the business of driving leads and sales through digital channels, you’re going to
need to use at least one tool on a daily basis. By familiarizing yourself with as many as you can—without
spreading yourself too thin, of course—you make yourself a more well-rounded marketer.
Here’s a (far from exhaustive) list of some common tools you’ll want to check out, segmented according
to field.
Search marketing tools
•
Google Ads Performance Grader: audit your Google Ads account (free)
•
Google Trends: see what consumers are searching (free)
•
Google Analytics: track your website performance (free)
Social media marketing tools
•
Facebook Ads Performance Grader: audit your Facebook Ads account (free)
•
Hootsuite: schedule your social media posts and track their performance
•
Awario: see who’s talking about your business on social media
Content marketing & SEO tools
•
Free Keyword Tool: discover valuable keyword opportunities (free)
•
Ahrefs: track and optimize your organic search performance
•
BrightLocal: optimize your website for local business
Email marketing tools
•
Constant Contact: stay in touch with your prospects and customers
•
ActiveCampaign: optimize and automate email marketing campaigns
•
SendinBlue: automate transactional email messages
15 SKILLS YOU NEED TO BECOME AN AWESOME DIGITAL MARKETER
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Conversion rate optimization tools
•
The CRO Toolkit: create and optimize pop-ups and landing pages
•
Zendesk Chat: talk to your site visitors in real time
•
Drift: automate basic customer support conversations
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15 SKILLS YOU NEED TO BECOME AN AWESOME DIGITAL MARKETER
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